You need to make sure that your legal holding process and technology are able to record and report the following details for individual cases and custodian banks: For companies facing frequent disputes, the reasons for using software to navigate their dispute are obvious. But what if your organization is only involved in a handful of legal issues a year? What if you don`t have the flexibility in your budget to invest in a process retention software license? Whether your company handles one, ten or hundreds of legal issues each year, your legal obligation to retain the data remains the same. The question then is: how can you successfully manage the retention process manually without automated software? If an organization does not demonstrate a defensible process, it may face severe sanctions and have a significant legal disadvantage. Create custom custodian dashboards to view the custodian status, number of confirmations, and overall health of your projects. A thorough legal detention process is not expected to end after the ban is issued. Many questions can be opened for long periods of time, so it is important to ensure that depositaries do not mistakenly assume that an active lock is no longer in force, while ensuring that they are also properly informed when their retention obligation has expired. Through careful monitoring and enterprise-wide compliance, legal retention requirements help ensure that all relevant information is retained so that it is available for dispute resolution. No matter where you are in the process, there is always room for improvement. Even small adjustments to your process can make a big difference. Here are some actionable tactics you can implement to improve your process maintenance process: An organization is required by law to retain all relevant data if it learns that a triggering event, such as an ongoing or imminent litigation, or if a dispute is reasonably expected, such as when a defective product causes injury. A legal dispute prevents looting – destruction, alteration or mutilation of evidence. The aim is to ensure that an applicant has fair access to all information that may be relevant to the dispute. In the legal stay overviews, the recipients of lawful restraint orders are ignored or hidden behind the phrase “any person who may have relevant data”.

As part of the eDiscovery process, the legal team responsible for managing the eDiscovery survey creates a list or overview of possible data sources (custodians). They often work with IT to find out who those sources are and where exactly their data is. This is an ongoing process and, as it progresses, other custodians may be discovered, to which a legal suspension notification should then be sent. For a more in-depth look at the entire eDiscovery process, please see eDiscovery 101, which details the processes surrounding the legal retention process. Corporate Legal Document Legal Hold How to Handle a Hold In-House Dispute eDiscovery Legal Holds Litigation Hold Software Litigation Holds Litigation Management What is a Litigation Hold A custodian is the person who personally owns and is responsible for the information that must be retained. Before the ban is issued, legal teams typically work with IT to identify all custodian banks relevant to the case. Custodian banks can also be “silent administrators”, i.e. people in the organisation whose data is kept without receiving any notification about it. This type of custodian bank is common, for example, in internal investigations.

As mentioned earlier, sending frequent reminders to custodians is one way to minimize the likelihood of data looting. The new email address is now the primary email address of the account on the retention lock, and the old email address is the alternate email address. The secondary email address is provided for reference purposes only and does not receive messages. Selecting existing custodian banks or adding new custodians should be a simple process. In addition to documenting the actions taken throughout the legal retention process, it is also important to keep an eye on the reason for your actions. For example, if the scope of retention changes at some point and new custodians are notified or existing custodians are fired, you must explain why this decision was made. Below, we`ll delve into all the important aspects of legal retention requirements and best practices for managing them. Automated litigation retention software also provides a defensible “audit” view that documents when each custodian has been added or released from a holdback, when each custodian has been queried, and when files have been collected. Detailed shutdown histories show all revisions of a block and confirm when custodian banks have received them.

Comprehensive reports on legal issues within the organization can provide information about each active deposit and deposit account at a glance. This level of evidence improves the defensibleness of your legal document retention process while saving time, improving employee productivity, and reducing the risk of looting. For this reason, it is important that you document the retention notification process to show when and how a legal suspension status was issued and recognized, and whether it was properly maintained from the time of the triggering event. You must keep track of all custodian banks and the actions taken throughout the process – issuance of withholding, deposit account confirmations, withholding reviews, reminders, and legal release of holdback. The most effective way to do this is to use Legal Hold Automation software so that all your actions are automatically recorded. Legal withholding should be initiated as soon as a triggering event occurs that activates the retention obligation. A triggering event can be if: The exact approach varies depending on the organization and circumstances. However, throughout this process, the legal team and other responsible parties must follow and document all steps to ensure a reasonable legal retention process in the event that their approach to data protection, including but not limited to data archiving, is called into question. Note: Removing an entity completely removes the custodian bank from legal ownership as if it had never existed. For example, if they have been appointed managers of a custodian bank, they will no longer appear as managers of the custodian bank. If you only want to remove the custodian store from the project without deleting its data, see Remove a custodian store from the project console.

Once you have added an entity to Legal Hold, you can assign a Legal Hold project as a custodian. See Projects. Next, learn how you currently handle legal retention notices. Do you use emails and spreadsheets to send notifications and track compliance? Compare current practices with your ideal process and focus on improving the acceptability of your methods. In this insightful webinar, Lindsay Kolar, Corporate Paralegal at Gordon Food Service, discusses the 6 most common legal challenges and how to successfully overcome them with the right processes and tools. The most critical step in the legal retention process is to determine when the obligation to retain information begins. As Zubulake and many other cases have noted, a legal lock is triggered when a legal dispute is “reasonably expected.” But what does “reasonably expected” really mean? It is important for directors to understand the scope of the issue in question so that they have more context as to why it is so important that they fulfill their duty of preservation. In some cases, knowing what is at stake can also help depositaries determine whether they have other potentially relevant ISEs that should be preserved.

If the email address change is done in relativity but not in Microsoft 365, changing the role must remove the user from the preservation lock. Follow these steps to update the company email address in Microsoft 365 to match the email address in Relativity Legal Hold: While most legal teams understand the procedural and financial seriousness of disputes, they still face common legal challenges in maintaining an efficient and reliable process. Those who still use traditional methods to manage the process face serious hurdles that, if not managed properly, can lead to data looting and non-compliance. Legal retention obligations result from a usual obligation to avoid looting of evidence. This obligation dates back to 1722 and Armory v. Delamirie, a dispute between a young chimney sweep and a goldsmith over a jewel found. Since then, requirements to prevent looting have slowly evolved over hundreds of years of jurisprudence, eventually leading to today`s legal conservation requirements. Any action taken in response to a legal obligation to detain must be carefully documented so that the organization can later describe its actions to a court, if necessary. The legal service should know who issued a detention notice, when it was originally issued, what it said, who received it and whether those custodians acknowledge receipt of it. The team must also follow any changes to the lock, such as new guards or revised restraint instructions.